


indoctrinated homecoming

by faedemon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Kids, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Character Study, Gen, Multi, Of sorts?, all of the characters are between the ages of like. 11-18 in this fic, bc summer camp, except its like. fucked up summer camp, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25095187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: out in the woods there’s a summer camp, and nobody sends their kids there, of course. it’s not advertised and no one knows its name and there are no humans to staff it. barely anyone even knows it’s there.kids arrive anyway. they stay the summer. they hike. they canoe. they do all the stupid things young kids do, and then they dootherthings. things that would be wrong and incomprehensible if this hadn’t become their summer normal so young, if they hadn’t been coming here for years. if this, if they, if only.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pontifeks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pontifeks/gifts).



out in the woods there’s a summer camp, and nobody sends their kids there, of course. it’s not advertised and no one knows its name and there are no humans to staff it. barely anyone even knows it’s there.

kids arrive anyway. they stay the summer. they hike. they canoe. they do all the stupid things young kids do, and then they do _other_ things. things that would be wrong and incomprehensible if this hadn’t become their summer normal so young, if they hadn’t been coming here for years. if this, if they, if only.

**cabin one: terminus**

the oldest cabin, the one that’s rickety and falling down and has no hot water. just two kids sleep here, the oldest of the campers, though their presence is not a matter of seniority. it’s so hard to find good candidates, nowadays.

oliver banks has only been coming to camp for two years. he’d snapped and got into a fistfight with another student in year 9, was suspended for two weeks, and that summer he found himself standing outside the camp gates, his bags packed. he thought he could remember having the strangest dreams. he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there, or when his parents had told him he was going to summer camp.

when he got into that fight, he’d caught a glimpse of something. curled, coiled behind that kid’s nose, tendrils coalescing into something that beat like a heart, like a living thing. it was so vivid, placed perfectly behind the spot oliver had been gunning to punch, and as he stared at that vision he got the awful impression that it would kill him. if he let his fist fly, it would push the bone of that kid’s nose backward, into his brain, and it would kill him.

he did not swing. a teacher dragged oliver away. he was suspended. he came here.

georgie barker doesn’t belong at camp, really. she hasn’t got the same spark the rest of them do (hasn’t got _any_ spark) and it’s a matter of chance that she ended up here, observing the summer. if she were a little different maybe she’d be a watcher. if she were a little different, maybe she’d never have stepped foot in camp at all.

as it is, she was spoken to by a corpse, and she doesn’t belong at camp, really, but terminus’ cabin is as good a place as any.

**cabin three: filth**

a fair few kids live here. they’re all the same, pretty much—nobody kids, unloved, desperate. they form their own sort of family. no one ever taught them how to take care of themselves or each other or their worlds, so it’s no surprise that their cabin is even worse off than terminus’—eaten away at, molded, rotting.

jane prentiss was dragged to camp kicking and screaming, but once she settled in, she had to be ripped away come time to head home. she’d always been a jittery girl. she’d looked so hard and long for a place of belonging, and here she found it, making friends with the campers and with the bugs. she and the other filth kids are the ones who can be trusted to lead the way on hikes. mother’s kids and viscera’s kids vie for the lead as well; none of them will gag at bugs on the path, or dead animals.

john amherst is not quite the same as jane, but he has all the same hallmarks: isolation, and not in the lonely way. bitterness. a desire for belonging. he doesn’t give into it quite so bonelessly as she does, but he does give in. his sleeping bag is damp and full of mold. he wraps it around the others’ shoulders, dragging them close, infecting them. more family members, he thinks. (most kids at camp refuse to touch him)

**cabin four: watcher**

the nicest cabin, objectively, and for good reason. more people live here than in any other, after all.

jonah magnus (by birth. he has been tossed to and fro in the foster system, and for some reason they insist on changing his name every time. last was james wright. now is elias bouchard. he has never stopped being jonah magnus) is one of the oldest campers, and not by age—he’s been coming to camp practically since birth, and he never had to hop between any cabins. he’s been a watcher since he first opened his eyes. he lives and breathes it. he unnerves the other campers, often.

gertrude robinson is younger only than the terminus kids, and every year that she comes, watcher has to fight to keep its hands on her. asag tries constantly to pull her to its side, those pyromaniac tendencies lighting her up like a christmas tree, dry and itching for a flame to catch. but she’s always been curious. she’s always been a tad too content to let things slide, just to see how they turn out. watcher keeps her.

gerard keay (and before him eric delano) came to camp kicking and screaming in the same way jane did, but he never found belonging like her. he left just as quick—only two years he stayed, gertrude’s hand gripped tight to his shoulder. he saw what happened to michael, and his stomach turned, and he went home for the year and come summer found he couldn’t come back. maybe it was a relief. maybe it wasn’t.

jonathan sims started out in mother’s cabin, when he first came. were it anywhere else that he started, it might’ve been accidental, but all her children, whether they stay or go, do so by design. watcher’s a better fit for him, anyway. he doesn’t like not having the answers. he doesn’t like not being in the know.

there are others. there are sasha james and tim stoker and martin k blackwood and basira hussain and fiona law and emma harvey and sarah carpenter. watcher keeps tight hold on them all, even the ones who don’t quite belong, not really.

**cabin five: asag**

infamously, the one cabin that’s been burnt down more times than campers it has held. somehow, every time, a new, identical cabin reappears while none of them are looking. more tinder for the fire, in any case.

jude perry is the rudest camper, honestly. she’s a right bitch to everyone except mike crew and agnes montague, mike because, in her words, _he’s a decent guy_ and agnes because it’s plainly obvious she’s obsessed with her. asag’s kids aren’t good at love, and jude is bad at it in the worst way.

agnes montague was born at camp, literally. after a fire had burnt down the cabin once again, she was found in its ashes, infant and quiet, sleeping peacefully on the still-hot ground. she goes to a foster home during the year, but for all that she stays there for nine months at a time, she walks like a ghost off-camp. life passes by her like a film reel. she’s only alive at camp, in asag’s embrace. (until she meets gertrude, and has never liked more the feeling of being watched)

**cabin seven: vertigo**

the biggest cabin, and the airiest. it gets cold at night, having so many windows, all of them open, but to be an occupant is to not mind. being chilly is an insignificant complaint. besides, it’s been a long time since they’ve felt the chill at all.

simon fairchild is a tad older than gertrude, but she thinks she’s the oldest, and he lets her believe that, because it’s funnier to watch her go about with her back straight like she’s greater than all of them. he came to vertigo because it was fun, because it left him breathless, because it was hilarious to watch adults gasp as his other foot came off the roof—

and it wasn’t quite as fun to be scolded for recklessness, but the way they’d gasped when he jumped made it worth it.

mike crew got bounced around. he started out in deceit, but he hated it, and he tried out filth but it disgusted him. viscera was promising, but ultimately he just didn’t fit in. watcher wasn’t for him at all. he figured out it was vertigo by falling into it, funnily enough, pushed through the threshold by one of deceit’s meaner campers and being suddenly hit with the sensation of _oh, this fits._

**cabin ten: violence**

they’ve tried, but bloodstains are so hard to scrub out of wood, no matter that viscera’s and predation’s stains could be removed with enough time (though they’ve largely stopped trying).

melanie king is the only camper that lives here, at least right now. there used to be more. there used to be a lot more. they picked each other off, is all—in this summer camp, you’re allowed to. here, it’s encouraged.

she didn’t come out on top. she arrived after the others had all kicked the bucket or aged out, and she doesn’t even _want_ to be here, hates it, really, but the only other cabin that would have her is watcher and that’s so much worse.

**cabin twelve: deceit**

the cabin that’s most like the winchester mystery house: doors where there shouldn’t be, staircases that lead nowhere, far too many rooms, most without purpose. the kids like to drag their sleeping bags into different rooms each night. sometimes they don’t sleep in the rooms at all, but across the thresholds, on the stairs.

michael (shelley, but not really) was a watcher, sort of. except that he wasn’t. he was gertrude’s tagalong, brought to camp even though he really shouldn’t have been there just because she wanted to see what he’d make of it. the human mind can create elaborate illusions to preserve itself. he saw none of what it all really was. he didn’t even notice violence’s kids killing each other.

she shoved michael into deceit’s cabin to see what would happen. what happened was that he fractured, the shelley part of him was cast away and perhaps never was, and deceit kept its grip on him.

helen (richardson, but not really) wasn’t a hiker. she’d gone for a hike for a change of pace, to get away from her family, and when she met michael in the woods she was looking for a bit of spontaneity. she followed him back to camp. she followed him into deceit, and became.

**cabin fourteen: predation**

the cabin you shouldn’t fall asleep in, lest its other occupants wake you, and begin the chase.

alice “daisy” tonner came to the camp by accident. she didn’t mean to kill calvin, she didn’t! but he had done so much hurt. he wasn’t the same boy anymore. and he deserved it, didn’t he? does the wrongdoer not deserve to be punished? shouldn’t she chase her prey?

she killed another kid and delighted in it and that summer she arrived at the gates of the camp and wept. and then wiped her tears away and walked in with an old phantom pain in her back spreading over her like a veil, like a promise.

the thing about the summer camp is that it’s a game, an adventure, a make-believe. the kids are LARPing, roleplaying, pretending to be great adventurers or investigators or villains. fire is a plaything and blackmail is normal and murder is okay, because they’re out in the woods, and their parents aren’t here, and does it really matter that much, anyway?

the counselors of each cabin let them run along and commit atrocities because that’s what they want. they scout out the kids in the world who are capable, who want it, and bring them to camp and set them loose. many die, some survive, and into the world emerge adults with a hunger that, when sated, feeds the counselors (the gods) in turn.

kids are so wonderfully impressionable. and they don’t question things! they show up at summer camp and they don’t remember how they got there or how long they’re going to stay, and they just accept it, just like they accept that murder is fine and that mold can grow on skin and cabins can be rebuilt from ash in a few hours.

they accept that they can go canoeing and eat together in the dining hall and tell campfire stories, just like normal campers do, and that any activity might turn into something more at any moment. the vertigo kids might drag you into the water. mother’s kids might have put something in your food. asag’s kids might kick away the stones around the fire and let it spread.

out in the woods, there’s a summer camp, and it’s not a summer camp, really, just modeled off of one. in essence it is rebirth. in essence it is youth and education, indoctrination. religion, maybe, if you think of it that way. inheritance.

if it were adults, maybe things would be different. but it’s kids, and they lap it all up like dogs. like sponges.

this is summer camp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dedicated 2 percy (ao3 user pontifeks) bc he put this idea in my head <3
> 
> not all of the entities are here bc i didn't Feel Like It
> 
> lmk what yall think... i don't really like writing fiction in all lowercase but this one just wanted to be written like that. also this fic went through like 4 different iterations before it settled on this version so perhaps i will put up another chapter with the could-have-beens if yall are interested?
> 
> also, the order of numbers for the cabin are inspired by [this](https://ectography.tumblr.com/post/622469078657957888/keepthemacramesecret-so-i-was-thinking-about) post (left to right, top-down) (its a good piece of meta as well, read it)


	2. et al

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> uhhh so here's the 3 variants this story went through before i settled on one

**uhhh. brainstorming**

death – camp director  
oliver banks – camp coordinator  
georgie barker – cabin coordinator

counselors:  
eye – jon, jonah, gertrude, gerry, elias, sasha, martin, tim, basira  
web – annabelle, emma  
spiral – michael, helen,   
stranger – nikola, danny, notsasha  
flesh – jared, tom haan,   
lonely – peter, evan  
dark – callum, manuela, dude-before-callum  
vast – mike, simon, sarah  
buried – grave guy, fiona  
desolation – jude, agnes,   
slaughter – melanie,  
hunt – daisy, Julia, trevor  
corruption – jane, bug wife guy, john amherst

**ver. 1**

There’s a summer camp in the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere and it’s run by a guy named Death. Or, actually, it’s run by a guy named Dean Thatcher, but he signs all his papers with _Death_ for short and the name stuck.

It’s not a particularly _good_ summer camp. It has all the staples, of course—overnight cabins, clearings in the woods for the nights they set up tents and build fires, an archery range, a lake that the kids canoe on. There’s even a questionable zipline, though that’s about it for any of the camp’s modern amenities.

It’s the only camp within a reasonable drive of most of the nearby towns, though, and country bumpkins love to have kids. So, for all that Camp Smirke is a pretty average, if not kind of shitty place, it still rakes in probably-too-much local money every year. With eight weeks of runtime and thirteen cabin counselors to supervise a bunch of children aged eight to eleven, Cabin Smirke has it pretty good, barring the possibly-haunted woods it takes up shop in.

Possibly.

* * *

**week one: the eye vs. spiral rivalry**  
Theo Eyre, affectionately called ‘The Eye’ or ‘Watcher’ by the rest of the counselors due to his uncanny eye-in-the-back-of-his-head vibes, absolutely hates his job, most definitely because he has about triple the campers everyone else has. If he were any less perceptive, he’d almost certainly lose track of them all within five minutes of the start of the day. None of them are particularly prone to escape, but one of the younger kids, this prick called Jonah Magnus, likes to try to slip away.

It doesn’t help that they’re some of the most judgmental kids he’s ever met in his life. Like, sure, he is also judging everyone else very harshly, but he does that in _private,_ where he’s not being a bad influence on young, impressionable children.

Gertrude Robinson is the worst of them. She’s the oldest camper there, eighteen and only a year shy of the youngest counselor, and she takes nobody’s shit. She also doesn’t take most of the reasonable requests thrown at her, and Theo has to fight to get her to do anything. For a girl so eager to be the one to start the fire every time they go camping—at least, ever since her third summer at camp when she met Agnes Montague—she’s surprisingly prissy about avoiding mud and woods and water and essentially everything camp has to offer.

On his one (1) night off that week, when one of their junior counselors takes over making sure the kids aren’t sneaking (or making) out, Theo flings himself onto the couch in the staff common area and groans.

“Having fun?” a voice asks, sounding far too gleeful for Theo’s liking. He groans incoherently in response.

Spyro (whose name was misheard as ‘Spiral’ when they were first introduced, and has since not stopped being called that) grins down at him where they lean over the back of the couch. Theo buries his face into the cushions, only mildly recoiling at the smell, firmly closing his eyes.

“Oh, absolutely. I love drawing the short stick,” he says bitterly into the fabric.

Spyro climbs over the couch, sliding down to sit in the space behind Theo’s knees. “It can’t be _that_ bad,” they say, ostensibly to reassure Theo, but almost certainly to mock him.

Theo lifts

**ver. 2: electric boogaloo**

Out in the woods there’s a camp and people from the nearby towns send their kids there. And no one can particularly remember the name or the address or how much they paid, or, for that matter, that they ever had kids at all—until the end of the summer when they return with wild stories on their tongues that they chuckle and nod along to, thinking, _oh, what campfire tales those counselors must spin!_

Out in the woods there’s a camp and all the kids who go there come out different. Not always badly, but sometimes, but does it matter when no one outside of it remembers how they went in? Does it matter when the kids themselves only have the vague impressions of who they used to be?

Out in the woods there’s a camp and there are fourteen camp counselors. And two of them scramble things, make it hard to remember and hard to notice, dizzying strangers that drive the buses of children coming to camp and leaving at the end. And one of them has their own gaggle of kids to look after, but still watches them all, eyes in the back of their head, on the back of their hands. And one plays puppetmaster, tugging the kids along through the daily schedule, from breakfast to lunch to dinner. And and and then. And one. And all of them.

See: The Eye, Beholding, called Eyebe, pronounced like Wybie, a figure with eyes where there should be unblemished skin, wearing a bright green counselor t-shirt and at the head of a line of kids, connected hand-to-hand. At the front is a girl named Gertrude and a boy named Jonah, who’ve both been coming since they were barely primary schoolers, and they hate each other, really, but they hold hands because Eyebe is _cool_ , okay, and they want to follow directions. Everyone else is lame. And behind them trot along the littler ones, young Jon and Gerry, and Gerry is quiet and alone but Jon has a gaggle of kids that follow him around, fighting for the privilege of holding his hand. Usually it’s Martin. Often it’s Sasha. Often, Tim pouts.

Eyebe teaches them all to _look_. _See_ the bumblebee as it lands on the flower’s head. See the geese as they land from flight onto the water. See some of The Spiral’s kids as they sneak out of their cabin in the night, bent on causing chaos, and keep that knowledge tucked close for when you need it. See the way Vast and Buried snip at each other, even though there’s a gravity between them. See the way each of their cabinmates’ hands sweat as they hold them. Know it.

And there is Es Mentiras, The Spiral, who the kids nicknamed Spyro when one of the younger ones misheard it. 

**ver. 3, which is still kinda interesting to me but i didn't know how to go about it effectively. also purple prose :/**

it’s like this:

there’s woods and there’s sea and there’s sky and earth and there is the dark. and there is light, flame flickering, and there are the things that chase you in it and there are the things that loom in the space between and there are things that watch you and things that beckon and it is a downward spiral, a descent toward eventual, inevitable doom. there are strings that pull you toward it, isolated, a rotting meat body swarming with flies being dragged by its killer toward the burial ground.

and its like those fucked up movies that kids love, like coraline. it’s an adventure to kids—oh, it gets a little hairy, but it’ll all work out. and in the background the parent watches on, aghast, white-knuckle grip on the back of the couch.

it’s a game. it’s an adventure, a make-believe, and yes it’s real, but it’ll be fine in the end. it’ll work out.

it’s like this:

in the summer the kids disappear. they run off into the woods and they don’t come out, and no one notices because the spiral makes them all forget, or the stranger sends replacements to go through the motions for a while. the kids run off into the woods and no one looks for them. and it’s an adventure.

the eye watches them, makes a daisy chain out of their hands, linked together as they walk. the kids ooh and aah at bugs on the path, at lizards, shriek at the dangling spiders that spin webs the eye knows to duck under. threads tug at the children’s wrists, trying to pull them off-course. the web distracts, but the eye watches, and keeps them going. they’ll get to the same place in the end.

es mentiras loves to taunt them into breaking off the path, too. illusions of bright flowers pop up as they walk, making an enticing trail into the woods, and the girls want so badly to follow. and the stranger makes figures in the trees, and the boys snicker and say ‘slenderman’ and one dares another to go out and try to get close.

fog crowds them back in, of course, making them afraid to go walking alone. things stalk them in the trees, and low growls keep them on course. it’s a splendid act, a collaboration, that guides the children into the heart of the forest.

this is summer camp.

the perfect center is a clearing, and the trees that form its border have scorched trunks. the dirt bears no grass, the earth barren, fire having eaten it up. above them, the sky yawns, stretching downward as if to pluck them up, raising them above the tops of the trees to look out over it all. the dry dirt seems to shift, ready to collapse inward. and beyond the treeline lurk things no one dares to acknowledge: a dark forest they can scarcely believe they’d just emerged from. a swarm of crawling things, waiting to latch onto them. the killers and the killed, the finality of them.

it’s ominous, and daring, and oh, such great fun.

it happens every year. the children are guided to the center of the forest, and the eye watches over them as they delegate, split up, begin collecting firewood and food and sticks tall enough to build a lean-to out of. it is a learning experience, and if every night beyond where the campfire’s light licks, the monsters they tell stories about lurk, listening, the children already know. the children were the ones who called for them.

the corruption makes their huts rot and fall, and the children build them anew, better. the desolation knocks stones from the ring around the campfire and lets it spread until one of them notices and stamps it out. the hunt sends wolves to steal the rabbits they manage to trap, until one of the older boys manages to scare them away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so these are what the story could have been if they didn't suck ass. none of them will be finished bc fuck that shit. but you get to look at the possibilities. as a treat.


End file.
